The Best College Comedy Ever Is Being Kept Off Streaming
The early aughts brought us a deluge of college party movies like National Lampoon’s Van Wilder and Old School, but I’m here to tell you that you’re doing yourself an incredible disservice if you’ve never seen 1994’s PCU, which is the best film in the genre by a considerable margin. Offering nothing more than a simple “we need to throw an epic party to save our house” plot line, PCU sets up its premise without patronizing its audience, and has zero room for throw-away jokes because of its tight 79-minute runtime.
A film like PCU that boasts such a simple premise shouldn’t be overlooked as mindless entertainment, however, because sometimes we all just need a fast-paced romp through the quad while a group of vegan protesters try to run us out of town after getting assaulted with over 100 pounds of raw meat.
Politically Correct University
PCU stands for Port Chester University, but quickly becomes an acronym for Politically Correct University according to Jeremy Piven’s James “Droz” Andrews. Droz is one of those guys who you’d love to have a beer or 12 with, but not the kind of person you’d like to establish any form of meaningful relationship with because he’s an agent of chaos and a loose cannon who only wants to party his face off. In his seventh year of college, Droz has an axe to grind against all of the “cause-heads” who latch onto whatever social issue happens to be the flavor of the week, which results in a litany of complaints against his group of fellow students known as “The Pit.”
When Tom Lawrence (Chris Young) visits PCU to as a pre-freshman, he gets caught in the middle of a years-long feud between The Pit, and their elegantly named rival group, the “Balls and Shaft,” who are led by an insufferable preppie named Rand McPherson (David Spade). Though Tom is merely visiting PCU, he quickly makes enemies because he always shows up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and he’s incredibly accident-prone. Despite his inherent ability to tick everybody off, especially after inadvertently crashing the computer lab while everybody is agonizing over their theses, Droz takes Tom under his wing and shows him what college life is really like.
On The University President’s Bad Side
The primary conflict in PCU involves Rand’s desire to sabotage The Pit while simultaneously bringing Greek Life back to campus. On a previous timeline, the frat house occupied by The Pit used to be the Balls and Shaft residence, but The Pit refuses to leave because it’s their party headquarters. Working with University President Garcia-Thompson (Jessica Walter), Rand compiles all of the complaints against The Pit, as well as the damage bill from the previous semester, totaling at over $7,000.
If The Pit cannot pay the damage bill and answer for their petty crimes, they’ll get kicked out of the house and expelled from school.
Party Your Way Out Of This One
As you would imagine, the remainder of PCU revolves around Droz, Gutter (Jon Favreau), and Mullaney (Alex Desert) resolving to throw the rager to end all ragers in order to raise funds and pay off the damage bill while offending as many people as humanly possible in the process. Meanwhile, Tom inadvertently (and continually) makes more enemies across campus as the film progresses.
After its initial setup, PCU is a crash course on stealing beer from rival dorms, disrupting campus protests for the fun of it whenever the opportunity presents itself, and using the Starland Vocal Band as a form of psychological torture if you know how to use a steering wheel lock as a means to trap your subjects in a stuffy banquet room.
But perhaps the most important piece of advice you can get from PCU is to never, under any circumstances, wear the shirt of the band you’re going to see.
An Unlikely Double Feature
GFR SCORE
On its own, PCU is a solid, care-free party movie about a rag-tag group of miscreants who playfully antagonize everybody on campus as their primary form of entertainment. But if you truly want to see our hero, Droz, get a taste of his own medicine, I strongly recommend watching PCU ahead of 2003’s Old School and treating the latter as a sequel set in an alternate universe where Jeremy Piven plays Dean Gordon “Cheese” Pritchard, who finds himself on the receiving end of the exact same kind of mayhem.
Unfortunately, this masterpiece of crass comedy isn’t streaming anywhere, so you’ll have to locate a DVD if you want to see what PCU is all about.
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